ShapBot
ShapBot is a bot operated by Parallel that crawls pages into a dataset that is then reused or sold. ShapBot is a web crawler by Parallel that collects and structures web content to power its search, extraction, and deep research APIs, providing AI agents with high-accur…. It is documented as honouring robots.txt, but no IP range list or reverse-DNS convention is published, so a request carrying this user agent cannot be proven genuine.
ShapBot at a glance
| User agent | ShapBotToken only. The operator has not published a full user-agent string, so match on the substring rather than an exact header. |
|---|---|
| Operator | Parallel |
| Purpose | Data scrapers and resellers |
| Respects robots.txt | Yes, documentedsource |
| Verification method | None published, user agent only No IP range file and no reverse-DNS convention have been published for this agent. The user-agent string is the only signal, and any client can send it, so treat a match as a claim rather than proof. |
| Crawl pattern | Not published |
| Robots.txt tokens | ShapBot |
| Operator documentation | None published |
ShapBot is a web crawler by Parallel that collects and structures web content to power its search, extraction, and deep research APIs, providing AI agents with high-accur…
Allow or block ShapBot
Paste one of these into the robots.txt file at the root of your domain. Rules are per token, so a block on one crawler leaves every other bot untouched.
User-agent: ShapBot
Disallow: /Blocks every path for this crawler only.
User-agent: ShapBot
Allow: /Explicit allow. Useful when a wildcard rule above it would otherwise catch this crawler.
User-agent: ShapBot
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /searchEdit the Disallow paths to match your own account, checkout and search URLs.
What blocking actually costs you
Blocking ShapBot stops your content being packaged and resold to third parties. Whoever bought earlier crawls still has them.
Block every crawler in the directory at onceIs that really ShapBot?
A user-agent header is a string the client chooses. Scrapers copy ShapBot precisely because site owners allow it. No IP range file and no reverse-DNS convention have been published for this agent. The user-agent string is the only signal, and any client can send it, so treat a match as a claim rather than proof.
Paste the IP address from your access log below. You will see whether it belongs to a hosting provider, a residential proxy pool or a Tor exit, plus the ASN that announces it, which is what tells you whether the claim holds up.
Other crawlers run by Parallel
Related crawlers
Identify crawlers automatically instead of by hand
Agentscan checks a request against published crawler ranges, reverse DNS and hosting data, then returns a verdict your edge can act on. One call per request, no range files to keep up to date.